Sunday, April 27, 2008

More developments

I guess there is not as much developments this week. We saw the export version of a Y-8 special missions plane.

Also from the recent times, someone made some nice photo comparisons of the radar + guns used on F-22P vs LD-2000. I'm guessing Type 730 at current time is not available for export, so the exported ships will be using a combination of gun + sensor systems like we've seen.compares the search radar used on F-22P between the placement on the model and on the ship. Looks like the SR-64 on those export brochures.

Also, there has been a lot of rumbling out of Chinese bbs recently that they are developing a successor to Type 730. Looks like China is going with the gun route for close-in weapon system rather than missile like RAM. I guess one of the problem is that they just haven't been able to come up with a compact and accurate short range SAM like RAM. It's kind of interesting that USN is going with the 57 mm gun as their primary CIWS now. Even though the successor to Type 730 is probably going to look more like 730 than 57 mm, I would think they eventually have to go with something like 57mm to replace the need of having both 76 mm and 30 mm on the same ship.

There are also some news coming out of the aerospace side. According to AVIC1, JF-17 production will be moved from CAC to GAIC. What is unknown at the present time is whether or not CAC will still do any production of JF-17. As we've seen, CAC didn't seem to set up any kind of mass production line for JF-17, so it took a long time to even get the first batch of 8 JF-17s delivered to PAF. It looks like CAC must have really been concentrating on J-10. The interesting part is that GAIC is already producing JJ/FT-7 and JL-9, so I wonder what kind of production rate they can get to with JF-17.

Also according to AVIC1, it seems like the mini-turbofan engines for cruise missiles and UAV are proceeding well in development. Although it is unclear from reading the article where exactly these engines are in development.

And finally, we heard that the Russians want to sue China for J-11B. It's interesting that they are doing this now, because we've known about J-11B for quite a while already. The next post will look at Pinkov's article on this and critique it.